Vicky Barr, Where are You?

I have a little weakness for series books about career girls from the 40s and 50s.In a box in the upper level of my loft is a complete-but-for-one set of Cherry Ames, Nurse books. Nudging her competent elbow is a clutch of Vicky Barr, Flight Stewardess volumes. Shiny, pert, pretty, independent, glamorous career girls who were always getting proposals from handsome doctors and businessmen, but who laughed them off for later, after they finished their madcap adventures and mystery solving with their chums.

Vicky would have been baffled by my experience at Pearson yesterday. First the usual tedium of the long check in line, customs (the agent never understanding what the hell I’m talking about with my distance learning program), extra phalanx of security for DC, the long wind to the far-thrown antiseptic gate U for DC, emptied of all possible hiding places and things-that-could-be-turned-into-weapons. Boarding plane, delighted to have exit aisle to self after Koreans banished for insufficient English… and then watching the pelting rain. Pelt. Down.

Three over-airconditioned hours on the tarmac later, we were released back to Gate U, electrical storms daunting the air traffic flow, no doubt more caution after the Air France flight slid in flames into a gully last August and all of the freaked out passengers ended up on the 401 flagging down cars. They also hurtled our luggage back into the free world so we had to find our way to arrivals through some previously unknown hidden warren, then run the gamut of check in, customs, security again.

Vicky embodied an overlay image of air travel as filled with tycoons and mysterious heiresses tended by sweetly flirtatious, china-cup-coffee-carrying trim-waisted women – a glamour that grimly tugs at our ankles as we trudge through the beeping sweaty melee of flight today. And yesterday, I realizes that another entertainment form has made me positively sanguine about traveling – the few seasons of The Amazing Race I watched. Watching those teams cajole, bargain, sneak and generally make indomitable pests of themselves, I imprinted a frame of travel as a game, and learned something about the porousness of the system. I don’t follow the instructions so much anymore. I called and rebooked myself on a flight while we were still on the plane. I wheedled my way in the back door to customs to avoid the long check in line. Recognized that, like the mess when the Air France thing happened, no one is really organized for contingencies – so looking for openings in the patterns and good-naturedly taking advantage of them seems to work.

This is a really crappy airport to be stuck in – it ain’t no wonderland of mini-massages, lattes and space-age sleeping capsules like the behind-the-customs-veil in Vancouver airport. My battery on my suddenly vital treo dribbled away (product of my defiance of the “cellphones off” order while we were on the tarmac) and I had no brain to read anything meaningful. And when I finally took off… it was 11.5 hours after we were supposed to leave – for a one hour flight. But. I wasn’t in as bad shape as the Russian couple coming from Rome, whose flight was hours delayed leaving Italy because none of the baggage handlers showed up to work after World Cup celebrations, and whose flight attendants put out a box of self-serve drinks and then snored in the back. They missed their connection home to San Francisco and had no idea when they’d pick up another one. And I wasn’t in nearly as bad shape as the woman with the two year old, on a leg from the UK, whose husband suddenly picked up a loud edgy fight in the holding pen back at Gate U at 9:30 p.m.

I didn’t get any real reading done. A few notes and articles, some kibitzing with my online pals, a few email flickers with F in Germany, a phone call with Renee. But I was fine with my earl grey and my John Irving novel, wondering how much of my life forward will be similarly measured out in airports, a distributed life incoherent to the Gutenberg-era guardians of territory, assessors of my documents and right to travel. Vicky